


ghost story

by Ffwydriad



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Post-Inhumans vs. X-Men, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 18:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19215169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ffwydriad/pseuds/Ffwydriad
Summary: After. Well. After everything, Dazzler heads out to California and starts singing again. She ends up meeting someone she hadn't expected to.X-Men Femslash Week Day 6 - choice





	ghost story

It's San Francisco, midnight, and the room is lit by nothing but the sound of the instruments and the scream of the crowd of people packed on to the dance floor, filtered through her into something no tech can match. The stage is low and her band is close and she feels like she's in the middle of the revelry, dancing alongside them. It's been a while since she performed like this, a while since she performed at all, really. She doesn't want it to end.

They dance like it's the end of the world, and they've survived, and she's found that's how everyone dances at her mutant pride concerts. She falls into the movement, gets lost in the lyrics. They're loud and angry. She doesn't write happy songs, anymore. She tries, and even the love songs come out screaming. 

No one here minds. They're not here for happy songs, they're here to sing and dance and lose themselves, the best they're here for is hope - and she can sing hope, even if she's not sure she believes in it anymore.

There's red hair in the back. Bright like fire, dark like blood, and she doesn't stop singing, doesn't stop dancing, but her eyes catch on to the woman in the back of the room. She leans against the back wall, and it's too dark to see her face, but there's a wave of recognition she can't quite put a name to. 

Three more encores, and she finally stops singing, dead on her feet, but a part of her knows that if she needed to she could run at a moment and still scream light as bright as can be. The room feels dark, and then the lights flicker on, dim and soft and keeping everything in shadow. 

She moves her way through the crowd with practiced ease. Everyone tries to buy her something, and she dances past all of them with warm smiles. She almost breaks someone's arm at a camera flash, but instead just pushes herself out of view. 

You don't need to worry who's watching, she tells herself, and plays it off with a joke. 

The DJ kicks on, and people start dancing again, but with nowhere near the heart they'd tossed at her, and finally she makes her way to the back wall to find the woman who was waiting there. 

There's a drink left at a small table, halfway finished, and fingermarks pressed in to the wall, but there's no one there to greet her, to tell her how glad they are she's back performing, to call her out on some mission and drag her back into the fold once more. 

A few minutes, she stands there, waiting for the woman to return, and when she's accepted the fact that won't happen, she makes her way out the back, to help pack up the equipment. Outside, the sky is pure black, like it always is in the city, but for a moment, she thinks she can see a field of stars above her. Not even a handful, but a thick rich tapestry, that lights up the sky with near as much color as the day. 

She blinks, and there's nothing there at all. The air tastes bitter on her tongue. 

Huh. She never did like ghost stories. They always left her feeling cold. 

* * *

She's never been good at mourning. 

Death wraps its shadowed arms around her and holds her close, and she burns away the sickness in the woods all alone. She buries the person who she used to be, the person who she could have been, and sits there, for a while, watching the flames of the funeral pyre. 

There isn't any pain. She doesn't remember, when she last felt pain, but it's gone, now, and it leaves a hole in her that nothing fills, not anger, not fear, not love. She breathes in the crisp air, and tries her best to cry. Nothing comes. 

Her fingers trace a worn strap of leather. If she can't do it for herself, then she can do it for everyone else. She meets with friends she hasn't seen in ages and friends she hasn't even met yet and gathers up the notes she'd left abandoned, writing out the songs she'd always wanted to sing. 

Now her hair curls at her shoulders and she twists it in her hands, and she braids it and unbraids it and holds scissors to the edge but doesn't cut. She stares at a face that for the first time in a long time has a fullness and a color to it, no makeup needed to hide dark circles beneath her eyes, and she lets the person in the mirror be, unchanged. 

It is both a foreign and a familiar sight, one about which she's not sure she knows how to feel. 

* * *

The ghost shows up to every concert she plays for weeks. She stands in the back and vanishes, right as the last song plays, and it only takes an instant of not looking, a blink and she's gone. 

There's no reason she has to be a ghost, of course, no reason she's not just some shy fan with particularly useful powers, but death is an old friend by now and it's not hard to see those who wear it like a cloak, not hard to see it in eyes that stare at her from across the room, half hidden beneath bangs. 

Everywhere she goes, it seems, she finds ghosts. They stand two spots ahead of her in coffee shop lines and pass her on the streets and run superhero teams, and this ghost, she comes to concerts like the rabid fans she used to have before - before everything. 

And normally, she doesn't like it, superfans or spectres. She's had more than enough of both, has grown to hate bright lights and eyes upon her and darkness and the feeling of death as it brushes against her shoulders, despite the fact that both of those things are perfectly natural, and have been for a while. Despite the fact that both of them are home.

But there's something in this woman's eyes, something she can't quite place. It feels almost like recognition, but no, that's not right. It feels like something, and it feels sad, and she wants to know. 

Even ghosts deserve to have people who ask if they're okay. 

* * *

She tries writing love songs, again. She's been writing love songs for a while, now, trying to recapture feelings that died long before she buried herself in the woods. 

The song ends up a tragedy. Better than the rest, which end up not being songs at all. 

She's fucking sick and tired of tragedies. Sick of losing, sick of dying, sick of everything falling apart and being left standing in the aftermath with the survivors wondering how long until the next tragedy comes rocketing towards them once again. Sick of endings that look happy but never last. Because nothing good can ever stay for too long.

Inevitability has never been her friend. That's the worst thing about ghost stories, too - there's nothing you can do to change the story. They're always tragedies.  They always end the same. 

She wants so bad to change this story. She wants so badly to believe in happy endings, to believe in hope again. 

* * *

It's been a month. She lets an illusion play the last song as she sneaks out the back, and she catches her ghost out front as she goes to leave. It's raining outside, but that doesn't matter. 

"Hey," she says. "I wanted to buy you a drink."

"I don't drink," the ghost tells her. She wears the shadows of a rainy night like one would wear a warm jacket, close and fitting.

"Neither do I," she says. "I don't get many people who show up to every single gig I play. Even fewer who don't want to talk to me. I feel like there's a story there."

"There are a lot of stories," the ghost says. "but none you'd want to hear."

She stares at a face framed by red and lingering in darkness. "Want to tell it anyway?" she asks. 

The ghost laughs, and for a moment, she isn't a ghost. The sound chases away the shadows and the rain, and everything feels like a warm summer night, and she's certain that if she looked up, instead of clouds she would see stars. It feels like the memory of a home she's long forgotten and outgrown and she wants to hold on to it as long as she can, but she keeps her hands at her side and she focuses on the rain and the dark and the things that are real. 

"Are you flirting with me?" her ghost asks. 

"Would that make you stay?" she asks in turn. 

There's a pause, at least, before she says, "No." And that's the crux of it, in the end. "It was nice to hear you sing again, Ali." And then she's gone, like she always is, just a blink and there's no one on the street but her.

She wants to shout out something. Come back. Tell me why, why, why something, why anything, why you keep leaving and why you look so sad and why you feel like home. She doesn't. She just stands dumbstruck in the street, not certain what to do next. 

The illusion on stage vanishes into stardust, and she walks around the back to where the van is, the street lights barely touching back here, and as she steps into the shadows, she swears that she can feel the echo of a memory, holding her hand tightly.

She squeezes back, and feels nothing but her own fingernails against the palm of her hand. 

* * *

The ghost doesn't show up, to the next concert, or to the one after that. When she sees no sign of red hair, even a month later, she's almost certain she scared her off. 

Somehow, the empty spot where her ghost ought to be is even more chilling than her presence, even more familiar. She stumbles once, in the song lyrics, and hopes the crowd is too drunk-high-caught up in dancing to notice. There aren't any lights of phones recording, partially because of how strongly she's forbidden it, sick to her stomach at the feeling of cameras on her, and partially because she isn't a sensation anymore, not here. For so long, that was her greatest fear, and now, it's comforting.

There's a hand on her shoulder as she steps out into the alleyway carrying one of the speakers. She pivots, not sure what she'd be able to do against an attacker without breaking some pretty expensive equipment, and she sees her ghost, standing there.

"You scared me," she says, setting the speaker down in the back of the van. "Geez," and her voice dies at the tip of her tongue, the word she wants to say missing. 

"Why do you care?" her ghost asks. "Why do you care so much about a stranger who likes to hear you sing? I'm not the only person who's shown up to every gig, so why do you care so much about me?"

She stares for a few moments, at the ghost's face. "You looked lonely," she says, finally. "Even ghosts deserve to have someone there."

"I'm not dead," her ghost says.

"You were."

"Some people deserve to be alone," her ghost says. "Some people ruin everything they touch."

On instinct, she reaches out, and grabs her ghost's hand. She holds it tightly between hers, giving it a gentle squeeze. "Not everything," she says. 

"We died," her ghost reminds her. "I think that counts."

"Dying never stopped me before," she says, "and you got better, obviously."

"Pretty sure I got worse," her ghost mutters, with a tight, sad little smile. 

So instead of saying anything, she smiles as warmly as she can. She doesn't smile a lot, not recently, at least not like this, not warm and beaming and content. The ghost squeezes her hand back, and her heart feels lighter, the darkness not so terrifying, and she leans in for a kiss. 

Her ghost tastes like summer, warm and sweet, and they aren't in an alley, anymore. They're looking up at a field of stars, the desert around them, still warm even without the sun. They're sitting on the rooftop and she feels giddy in a way she has only felt when she's drunk or just written a new song, and she's kissing Maddy. 

She's kissing Maddy, in an alleyway, she's kissing Maddy, out back behind a concert standing by the van, she's kissing Maddy who she hasn't seen since New York got turned into hell, who she hasn't really seen since before that, in Australia, who she hadn't need to see to hold on to, blind, trapped, scared, and still fucking ready to fight.

Maddy pulls away from the kiss, lets go of her hand. 

"Don't go," she says. She's not sure what else to say. 

"Alison, you do remember that I'm a supervillain, don't you?" Maddy asks. But she doesn't look scary, or angry, or villainous. She looks tired. She looks sad. 

"You wouldn't be the first supervillain I've let crash with me," she says. "And I don't think you would be. You're not a bad person, Maddy."

"That's sweet of you," Maddy says. "I wish I could believe it."

She doesn't blink. She grabs out to take her wrist, to hold her hand, to do something. She's too used to having people she loves vanish without a trace, watch them become people she doesn't know anymore, and she fights against it. She holds on to everything that feels like it might just start to fill up that empty hole in her chest. 

The problem with ghost stories is that their endings are inevitable; her hands pass through shadows, and she doesn't even need to blink, this time, to watch her ghost vanish in to the night. 

She stands there, and she tries to think up an ending to the song that isn't a tragedy. 


End file.
